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Episode 250: A Long-ish Listener Email Extravaganza
Date July 24, 2013 Summary Ben and Sam answer listener emails about rating prospect ratings, baseball without rain delays, updating the box score, and more. Topics * Evaluation of prospect ratings * No rain delays * Changing baseball seams * Field dimensions * Recreating the box score * Pitcher wins to value early eras Intro The Kinks, "Australia" Banter Kole Calhoun's comments on his 3 home run game. Email Questions * Joe: "For a sport as obsessed with stats as baseball, why don't we use the tools that predict the performance of the players to evaluate the people who attempt to predict that performance or rate farm systems? No one would expect an extremely high success rate but it would be nice to know average performance." * Andrew: "Another topic for a slow day that we were discussing here in my office: what if baseball didn't have rain delays, and it was like football and just played through the rain? How would that change the game? Would there be guys who were rain specialists, especially with pitchers and fielders who specialized in fielding and throwing a wet baseball. Would it benefit the hitters because defenders would move much more slowly to prevent themselves from slipping and injuring themselves, leading to more balls dropping in, etc." * Kevin: "If MLB ever decided knuckleballing was out of hand, here's how to stop it. Instead of trying to legislate what is or is not a knuckleball (which seems impossible), just lower the height of the seams on game used baseballs, making the pitch less effective and therefore less common (this would also reduce the effectiveness of curveballs and other breaking pitches which should please our friend Travis from the forums)." * Tom: "While buying tickets to the 2014 opening day series in Sydney I noticed on the seating plan that there was a scaled map of the field dimensions. Using my below average but still slightly useful engineering skills I scaled the map up and found that the field has the following dimensions. Left field and right field, 320 feet, and 385 feet to center. To me this seemed ridiculously small for a ballpark and checking my numbers I found that this field will indeed be small, in fact the distance to center field is potentially the smallest ever. Allowing for my scaling errors, it's about the same as the Reds' Crosby Field which was 387 to center. How small does a ballpark have to get to be too small? At what point would Major League Baseball step in and say that the field dimensions are not suitable, either find a bigger ground or we'll take opening day to another country. Would a field like this be approved if it was to become a permanent facility in the major leagues or is MLB allowing it just because it's for two games?" * Rob: "If you could redefine a box score to capture the results of a game, what would the line be for pitchers, batters, defense, and framing?" * Zach (Fort Collins, CO): "I was reading a biography of Babe Ruth the other day and encountered this assessment of pitching value: 'Baseball students say that a man who wins 10 games more than he loses in a season is an exceptional pitcher. The Red Sox had four +10 pitchers in 1915 and a fifth +8.' I have never seen this way of assessing pitcher value before, certainly not on sites like BP which is pretty down on using wins to value pitching. What I wonder though is whether it is reasonable to use wins as a way to value pitchers from this earlier era when pitchers routinely pitched complete games. For example, Ruth had two seasons during his early twenties when he threw over 320 innings. On the leaderboard of starting pitchers in 1918, almost all of the pitchers had at least 10 complete games, most had more than 20 and several had more than 30. So for an era unlike ours when pitchers usually threw complete games, can wins be the useful value for a pitcher as most mainstream outlets still seem to use them?" Notes * Sam & Ben are hesitant to see baseball played in a downpour, considering that a pitcher could cause serious harm, or even death, to a batter. * Sam would like to see strike percentage for pitchers, plate appearances instead of at-bats, and how many times reached base instead of hits. Links * Effectively Wild Episode 250: A Long-ish Listener Email Extravaganza Category:Email Episodes Category:Episodes